Chicana Noir and Other Stories
Release date: October 1st, 2026
 
 
"...A collection that focuses on the pursuit of identity and cultural memory..."
 
–Kirkus Reviews
 
"Margaret Elysia Garcia’s writing is enthralling, introspective and honest. In Chicana Noir and Other Stories, she elevates commonplace people and events and infuses them with metaphoric and, at times, horrific meaning. She peels back the facade of the ordinary to reveal an underside of frustrated desires, hidden motivations and unfulfilled dreams. Garcia is an original literary voice whose writing is top notch!"
 
–Jesús Salvador Treviño, author of The Fabulous Sinkhole and Other Stories, The Skyscraper that Flew and American Book Award-winning Return to Arroyo Grande
 
"In Chicana Noir and Other Stories, the real horror isn't supernatural—it's adjuncting without health insurance. From the fever dream of "Chicana Noir Story #1" to the revenge fantasy of "The Last Cruise," Margaret Elysia Garcia writes with the urgency of someone who knows that survival itself is resistance. Garcia's narrators exist in the margins: too educated for some spaces, not "authentic" enough for others, navigating a world where the supernatural feels way more believable than the American Dream. A demon sits on your chest in your dead brother's room. Your grandmother practices witchcraft to protect the family. A serial killer terrorizes the city while three teenage girls form a blood pact. From "Come and Play" to "The Last Cruise," these stories pulse with the rhythm of Whittier Boulevard, the Smiths on repeat, and the complicated inheritance of being a Chicana-in-Doc-Martens in a country that wants you invisible. Garcia has created something rare: a collection that's both deeply personal and politically urgent, where punk feminism meets magical realism and neither apologizes for taking up the space."
 
–Ariel Gore, author of We Were Witches, The Wayward Writer, and Rehearsals for Dying
 
"These stories are beautifully constructed, line by line creations, portraits, pictures of darkness and light in the lives of characters we come to know as though they live next door. And in many cases they do, and we do not see them. Frank O'Connor said that the soul of the short story as an art form arose in what he called, "Submerged populations," those who were "overlooked or marginalized" in the countries where they lived. Well, here is the short story, the art form itself, robust as ever, in Margaret Elysia Garcia's hands."
 
–Richard Bausch, author of The Fate of Others (Penguin Random House) and The Stories of Richard Bausch (Harper Perennial), winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story
 
 
Macondo fellow Margaret Elysia Garcia is the author of the poetry collection the daughterland (El Martillo Press, 2023), of the short story collection Graft (Tolsun Books, 2022), and the poetry chapbooks Iconistas!, and Burn Scars, (Lit Kit Collective, 2025, 2022). She’s the co-editor of the anthology Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country (AK Press, 2025). Her second short story collection Chicana Noir and Other Stories will be published in 2026 by El Martillo Press. She's the recipient of Chapman University's non-tuition fellowship for Creative Writing.